Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/6] remove USE_THE_INDEX_COMPATIBILITY_MACROS

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2022 10:14:42 +0900

Phillip Wood <[email-masked]> writes:

>> That's correct, although even if that were the case that wouldn't
>> be an issue with this migration, as we'd have been using
>> "the_index" before, just indirectly through a macro.
>
> Indeed, I'm just not convinced that it is worth removing the macro in
> library code without changing to take a struct istate (I don't see the
> existence of the macro itself as a problem as I think it is just a
> symptom of the real problem) but I seem to be in the minority on that
> point.

True.

Many subcommands need to deal only with the_index and no other
index, so for the implementations of the top-level subcommands that
work only in a single repository, the macros are not by themselves
problems.  The deeper parts of the system that we want to reuse by
libifying of course eventually need to learn to take an arbitrary
"istate" and NO_THE_INDEX_COMPATIBILITY_MACROS mechanism (and its
successor USE_THE_INDEX_COMPATIBILITY_MACROS, probably) was a great
approach for that goal.